In recent years, there has arisen a demand for a method capable of efficiently executing the planning, control, and analysis of a complicated clinical process for carrying out the optimum medical care. In order to respond to the demand, there is a proposed method of clinical pathway applying a critical pathway (Prior-art Example 1).
The clinical pathway is the schedule summarizing the routine work in clinical service, and defined as “a summary of admission guidance, admission orientation, laboratory test, medication, diet counseling, bed rest level, discharge guidance, and the like as a routine for a patient having a certain disease in a schedule”. Further, the clinical pathway is a technique invented for an increase in efficiency of and standardization of clinical process. Originally, it derives from the process control technique in manufacturing industries referred to as a critical path method. As the process control techniques similar to the critical path method, there are the methods of PERT (Program Evaluation Review Technique) and Gantt Chart (Prior-art Example 2).
These methods exert their effects when the connection among respective operational services such as the order relationship among them is clear to a certain degree. However, in some of the processes targeted for the process analysis, the connection among respective services is not prescribed, or, in contrast, the connection among respective services must be derived from recorded processes. With the clinical process analysis in the medical field in recently increasing demand, the process in which the connection among respective clinical services is not clearly prescribed is often handled, so that it is difficult to prescribe the clinical services even to the details. This is because the disease, the patient status, the rendered clinical services, and the like are involved with the judgment of a physician complicatedly in each process.
The compliance of the performed clinical process to the clinical pathway is required to be analyzed continuously for the maintenance and the improvement of the quality of the clinical pathway. The analysis of the performed clinical process is useful for the determination of the effects and the improvement of the clinical process, the detection of an outlier, and the like even when the clinical pathway is not clearly shown. As analysis and reference methods of a clinical process being performed, in Japanese Published Unexamined Patent Application Nos. 10-214302 and 2000-348117, there are proposed medical treatment support systems in which the clinical process for each patient is displayed in a format of a table or in a format of a list (Prior art Example 3). Further, as one application of the analysis of the clinical process being actually performed, there is a proposed method for forming the prototype of the clinical pathway from the records of the performed clinical process. This method is described, for example, in Proceedings of the 17th Japan Joint Conference on Medical Informatics, on pages 140-141, issued in 1997 (Prior art Example 4). With this method, the prototype of the clinical pathway is formed from the statistics of clinical services for patients of similar cases. Incidentally, in the extraction of similar clinical processes and the classification of the clinical processes, the information of attributes included with the clinical process such as diagnosis and surgery is used, or the information classified according to the clinical service such as the information on execution or non-execution of a specific clinical service such as surgery is used.
With the foregoing prior-art technology such as PERT, Gantt Chart, or the critical path method (Prior-art Example 1), it has been difficult to calculate the similarity between processes when the relationship among services is not clearly described. For this reason, unfavorably, it has not been possible to easily perform the analysis of processes such as the classification of recorded processes or the detection of outliers.
In the medical field, particularly, the detailed relationship among clinical services is often not clearly described. Therefore, it has been difficult to calculate the similarity between clinical processes by using Prior-art Example 1 described above. Particularly, with a prior-art technology on the clinical pathway, an emphasis has been laid on the formation of the clinical process for each patient, so that sufficient consideration has not been given in regard to the analysis of the clinical processes for a plurality of patients. With the technologies disclosed in Japanese Published Unexamined Patent Application Nos. 10-214302 and 2000-348117, the display format by a text such as a table or a list is adopted in the reference method of the clinical processes. Therefore, unfavorably, it has been difficult to refer to and analyze a plurality of clinical processes. Whereas, in the foregoing technology on the formation of the clinical pathway from the clinical process records, described in Proceedings of the 17th Japan Joint Conference on Medical Informatics, the trend of the whole similar processes previously extracted according to the attribute is calculated. Thus, unfavorably, it has been difficult to perform a detail process analysis such as clinical process clustering therein. Further, it has not been possible to perform the classification according to the clinical services themselves, i.e., according to when and what has been done. Particularly, it is not possible to implement a detail case mix based on only the diagnosis and surgery, so that various cases are observed as analysis targets, making the analysis difficult.
An objective of the present invention is to provide a process analysis method enabling clustering the performed processes, and extracting similar processes even when the processes in which the relationships among services are not clearly described Further, it is another objective of the present invention to provide a process planning and control method applying such an analysis method. Still further, it is a still other objective of the present invention to provide an information system using these methods. Particularly, it is a further objective of the present invention to provide a clinical process analysis method capable of the clinical process clustering and the similar clinical process extraction, and a treatment plan/control support method in the medical field. It is a still more further object of the present invention to provide a medical information system using these clinical process plan, control, and analysis methods.